Diamonds are a girl’s best friend… and a great data collection tool!

This article explores an innovative and visual data collection tool: The Diamond. The Diamond allows for participants to rank specified items or statements and place them onto a Diamond shape. It can measure various descriptors, such as importance, with the most important item at the top and the least at the bottom. This allows for the researcher to see the overarching relationships between the different items of statements. Participants are asked to discuss the reasoning behind the placements, which provides a qualitative element to a quantitative data set. This article is intended to be a practical guide as how to use the Diamond and analyse the results, discussing the practicalities of it and other potential uses. The examples used throughout are from researched which used the Diamond, namely in clinical legal education and youth justice studies.